Sh17,011,241.95. That is not a rounding figure invented for effect. It is the precise sum, down to the last cent, that keeps resurfacing in whistleblower complaints, union correspondence and, most damningly, in the sworn record of the Employment and Labour Relations Court, every time the question is asked of who really controls the union dues deducted from the payslips of Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company (NCWSC) workers. For more than a decade, that money has moved through a system that was supposed to be simple and accountable. Instead, it has become the currency of an alleged fraud, a bitter inter-union turf war, and a public utility’s quiet acknowledgment that it may owe the difference.

A fresh whistleblower complaint filed with the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) by long-serving NCWSC employee Hesbond Nyamagwa has reopened a scandal that Nairobi Water insiders had hoped was buried. Nyamagwa’s complaint, stamped as received by the anti-graft body, alleges that dues deducted from workers’ salaries on behalf of the Kenya County Government Workers Union (KCGWU), and the statutory share owed onward to the Central Organisation of Trade Unions (Cotu-K), were never properly remitted. He wants EACC to establish whether the company complied with the law, how the missing millions were spent if they were not remitted, who authorised that spending, whether public funds were ultimately lost, and who should be held to account.

A System Built to Be Simple, Allegedly Gamed by Insiders

Under the Labour Relations Act, an employer that deducts union dues from a worker’s pay is required to remit the full amount to the union’s designated account within ten days. The union then owes Cotu-K its statutory cut. It is a mechanical, almost bureaucratic obligation. KCGWU Assistant General Secretary Kevin Owango insists it was deliberately subverted at the branch level. “Nobody is supposed to remit money to the branch account. The money should go to the national office, which then remits Sh100 out of every Sh500 deducted back to the branch for administrative expenses,” Owango said, placing the blame squarely on what he called rogue branch officials who allegedly diverted funds meant for the national union and, by extension, Cotu.

Owango’s account is not new. On February 4, 2021, KCGWU wrote to the Directorate of Criminal Investigations demanding a full inquiry into the alleged fraudulent theft of trade union dues, after Cotu discovered it was not receiving its share and after the union’s own efforts to obtain NCWSC’s bank remittance details were met with what the letter described as a lack of cooperation. That complaint appears to have gone nowhere for years, a familiar pattern in Kenyan parastatal graft cases where a paper trail exists but consequences do not follow.

The 2022 Reckoning, and Public Money Called In to Cover a Private Hole

The matter resurfaced in February 2022, when Cotu-K wrote demanding payment of the outstanding dues. Minutes from a May 11, 2022 meeting between Nairobi Water and Cotu show the company committing to settle more than Sh17 million after internal discussions concluded the money had allegedly been misappropriated by union officials. Current NCWSC Managing Director Martin Nang’ole, who took over the corner office in April 2026 after Nahashon Muguna’s exit, has described the affair simply as a historical case the company is facing. It is a carefully bloodless description for an arrangement in which a public water utility, answerable to Nairobi ratepayers, appears ready to absorb losses that trace back to alleged theft inside a private union structure it was never supposed to be entangled with.

The Hidden Story: A Turf War Over the Same Pot of Money, Fought in Open Court

What the whistleblower complaint frames as simple embezzlement by branch officials is, on the documentary record, something considerably messier and more revealing. The exact figure at the centre of Nyamagwa’s complaint, Sh17,011,241.95, is the same sum that surfaced in Employment and Labour Relations Cause No. E747 of 2021, a case pitting KCGWU against NCWSC, the Kenya Union of Commercial and Allied Workers, the Kenya Union of Water and Sewerage Employees (KUWASE) and the Registrar of Trade Unions, with a group calling itself the National Union of Water and Sewerage Employees (NUWASE) fighting to be joined as an interested party.

In an application dated October 2, 2023, the NUWASE faction, through an affidavit sworn by Philemon Otieno Atik, described in court papers as branch secretary, asked the court to order Nairobi Water to deposit the Sh17,011,241.95 into a union account, to have rival officials forcibly evicted from union offices at the water company, and to have arrest warrants issued against named NCWSC and Registrar of Trade Unions staff whom the applicant branded impersonators and fraudsters. Among those named in that application were NCWSC employees Elijah Otieno Awach and Matilda Jabot Kimetto. The applicant also accused KCGWU and the water company of disobeying a string of earlier court orders and of allowing dues to be diverted to the wrong side of a long-running recognition dispute.

The rival camp fought back hard. KUWASE’s replying affidavit argued that the NUWASE faction lacked the standing to bring the case at all, that the same issues had already been litigated and resolved in earlier suits, and, tellingly, that the fraud allegations had not named any individual who could be directly and provably connected to the missing money. On October 13, 2023, Justice Anna Ngibuini Mwaure ruled on the narrower legal question rather than the underlying fraud claim. Having summoned the Registrar of Trade Unions to testify, the court found that NUWASE had itself changed its name years earlier and was succeeded by the properly registered KUWASE, meaning the applicant pushing the Sh17 million claim was not a legally recognised union at all. The application was dismissed in its entirety, with costs awarded against the applicant.

That outcome matters enormously to how this scandal should be read. The court did not clear anyone of wrongdoing, and it did not find that the Sh17 million had been properly accounted for. It simply found that the faction demanding the money back had no legal standing to ask a court for it, a technical knockout that left the underlying question of where the dues actually went unresolved and unlitigated on the merits.

A Fight With a Long, Expensive History

This is not the water sector’s first collision over check-off money. A 2013 Court of Appeal ruling in a dispute between NUWASE and Nairobi Water recorded arrears claims running into billions of shillings, with the union at the time complaining that the company had continued remitting dues to a rival body instead of to it. The 2013 case and the 2023 case are not the same dispute, but they describe the same structural failure: a water utility caught between competing unions each claiming the exclusive right to represent its workforce and, with it, the exclusive right to the dues stream that comes with that representation.

The pattern repeated in 2020 and 2021, when the Employment and Labour Relations Court declined to register a Collective Bargaining Agreement KCGWU had signed with Nairobi Water, with Justice Maureen Onyango ruling that KCGWU lacked the capacity to negotiate one while a rival recognition agreement dispute remained unresolved, and directing KCGWU to remove water sector workers from its own constitution. That ruling, on its own, undercuts any simple narrative that KCGWU was the untroubled, legitimate custodian of workers’ dues throughout this period. The union whose officials are now accusing rival branch officials of theft has itself been found by a court to have overstepped its mandate in the same sector, at the same company, over the same category of money.

The Rivalry Has Not Gone Away

As recently as November 2025, officials aligned with KUWASE were publicly clashing with a rival grouping, the Water Services Workers Union, this time over unpaid pension arrears owed to retirees under the Local Authorities Pension Trust, with KUWASE-aligned officials insisting the debt predates current leadership and belongs to the Nairobi County Government and the National Treasury rather than to the water company itself. The specifics of that dispute differ from the Sh17 million check-off matter, but the pattern is identical: competing factions inside the same workforce, each insisting the other bears responsibility for money that workers and pensioners never fully received, while the company at the centre manages the reputational fallout.

What EACC Must Now Establish

Nyamagwa’s revived complaint gives the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission an opening that the 2021 DCI letter and the 2023 court case never fully delivered, an independent investigation unconstrained by the standing technicalities that sank the earlier court bid. Investigators will need to trace the actual remittance records rather than rely on rival unions’ competing narratives, establish definitively whether the Sh17 million was diverted to branch accounts in breach of the Labour Relations Act, determine what role, if any, NCWSC officials played in enabling wrong remittances or stonewalling Cotu’s requests for account details, and clarify why a matter reported to the DCI in 2021 produced no visible action for five years. Only that kind of forensic accounting, rather than another round of union finger-pointing, will tell Nairobi Water’s employees whether their money was stolen, misdirected in a legitimate representation dispute, or some combination of both.

What is not in dispute is that ordinary workers, the people who keep Nairobi’s taps running and its sewers flowing, had money taken from their pay for a purpose that a decade of court filings and commission minutes now suggest was never fully honoured. Whether the villains turn out to be, in KCGWU’s telling, rogue branch officials, or whether the fuller record implicates a wider circle of union rivals and company insiders who let the system rot rather than fix it, the public utility’s apparent readiness to quietly cover the shortfall should trouble every Nairobi ratepayer whose bill ultimately funds NCWSC’s balance sheet. The documents are now with investigators. Whether this becomes the case that finally breaks the fifteen-year cycle of allegation without accountability remains, as it has for over a decade, an open question.